


inconvenient festivities

by orphan_account



Category: Fence (Comics)
Genre: Fence Secret Santa, M/M, Mistletoe, but whats new, the boys being dumb and gay basically
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-27
Updated: 2019-12-27
Packaged: 2021-02-26 16:28:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21981265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: “this isn’t the stupid kissing weed, is it?”
Relationships: Nicholas Cox/Seiji Katayama
Comments: 6
Kudos: 99
Collections: Fence Secret Santa 2019





	inconvenient festivities

**Author's Note:**

  * For [harrybopeep](https://archiveofourown.org/users/harrybopeep/gifts).



> USHSJDJ MERRY CHRISTMAS EMILY!! ur prompts were all rly cute but i chose mistletoe 🥺 anyways this was literally. such a disaster to finish in time bc i managed to delete???? my final draft?????? but hey here it is ! i hope u enjoy it 😎 
> 
> from ur secret santa :,)

As far as ‘school christmases’ go, Nicholas reckons he’s had a pretty good one.

Yeah, for anyone else, sleet, freezing temperatures, soggy pudding and lack of gifts might have been disappointing. But Nicholas isn’t  _ most people.  _ The fact that he’s here, in his dorm room instead of at home is a dead giveaway; so by his standards, even the weak lights in the corridors and the half-naked tree by the deanery is better than his bare apartment.

So it’s cold, but nice, peaceful, Nick might go so far as to say, until later in the evening when he’s lying sprawled on his bed listening to  _ wham!  _ And the door opens.

Nick freezes at the sudden, familiar sound of the annoying broken doorknob turning and then the door swinging, and then takes out his earphones when a tall figure steps into the room. And then a large black suitcase and a fencing bag.

Nick’s pretty sure this isn’t a thing that’s happening. Seiji shouldn’t be here; it’s the holidays, and he’s supposed to be at his probably-mansion eating honey-roasted ham in a v-neck sweater and pulling crackers with his family. He definitely should not be kicking his bag under his bed and pulling off his shoes like this isn’t some kind of weird practical joke.

And then Seiji looks up, apparently now realizing Nick is also here and also that there are cheap Christmas lights and paper snowflakes and tinsel strung up all over the duck curtain and the tinny melody of  _ last christmas  _ is playing through Nick’s discarded headphones, which are on Nick’s bed, which has Nick on it.

So Nick makes a brainless choice and catches Seiji’s eye. Well. It’s an accident, really, but it’s still a colossal mistake. He’s standing beside the door, but Nick can still make out the expression he’s wearing. It’s clearly hurt, though Nick’s rarely glimpsed this sort of emotion on Seiji, so he can’t be one hundred percent sure. What he generally sees is something close to anger, or irritation, so he doesn’t quite know how to react to red rings around Seiji’s eyes or the near-dry tear tracks on his cheeks.

Usually, Nicholas would do everything in his power to wind the guy up, but he’s never actually seen Seiji crying before, and it’s unnerving and horrible and Nicholas  _ would  _ stand and give his pompous brat of a roommate a hug but he feels like that would make whatever’s happened worse than it already is. So he stays quiet and stares worriedly at Seiji like a clueless idiot, because that’s kind of what he is when it comes to comforting the homies. And he and Seiji aren’t even really friends, even though Nick once claimed they were. 

Even though Nick feels a little guilty for not prying, it seems like the right choice, because Seiji averts his eyes from Nick’s and pretends nothing happened. He unzips his suitcase stiffly and piles all of his dumb shampoos and oils into his arms and disappears into the bathroom. 

  
  


So that’s a thing.

  
  


Nick blinks a few times and turns off the music. Half his brain is incredibly pleased there is no shouting match going on right now, but the other half is demanding why the fuck Seiji is back and _ is he alright _ ? But he stays put because Nicholas does not fancy getting yelled at or possibly punched, which wouldn’t be very festive. 

This basically ruins his whole evening. He’s just a little on edge, and can’t focus on anything, not even  _ arthur christmas. _ And nicholas loves  _ arthur christmas _ , so this is incredibly concerning. He listens to a whole muse album, which seems even longer than it really is, because anything seems long if you’re waiting on your horrible stuck-up roommate to get out of the fucking shower so you can ask him why he’s crying. 

  
  


The water switches off after a good hour and a half, and nick sits up so fast his earphones fall out. However seiji doesn’t come out of the bathroom; he stays in there for another thirty minutes doing god knows what. Probably a pity party, Nicholas thinks fleetingly. Or a silent rave. Seiji doesn’t really seem like a rave type of guy, but you never kn-

“Take all of this down, will you?” Nick hears, snapping him out of his thoughts. It’s seiji, and he’s standing, waving at the decorations with one hand and holding the curtain with the other so that Nicholas can have a perfect view of his trademark tight-lipped glare. At least he’s being an asshole again, though, because at least Seiji being an asshole is normal.

And his outfit, which Nicholas’s useless, icompetent brain gets stuck on. He’s wearing sweatpants, which really shouldn’t matter, except it kind of does matter, because he looks weird and not like Seiji. They look like expensive sweatpants, granted, but this is a shocking development. Plus the hoodie. It’s a more than a little concerning. Words that come to mind immediately are ‘soft’, ‘cute’, and Nicholas herds them away to deal with never.

And then he realises that Seiji is still talking to him. Well. not  _ talking,  _ more like ordering, but what else would you expect from him? And then Nicholas remembers what exactly Seiji is telling him to do, and says incredulously, “It’s  _ Christmas!” _

“I don’t care,” Seiji snarls. “These stupid lights are obnoxious and  unnecessary .”

Nick is just a little bit outraged. Yes, they are obnoxious. But they are completely necessary. Because it is Christmas Eve and the dorm will look hideous without them.

“You can’t just come back and take down all my decorations,” he simmers.

Seiji ignores him and plucks a plastic reindeer off his beside table, and then throws it across the room where it lands neatly in the bin.

Nicholas gasps, scandalized. “ _ Dancer!”  _ he says.

“Not anymore,” Seiji sneers.

Nicholas watches as Seiji ruthlessly tears down all of the decorations and dumps them on the end of Nick’s bed, where they sit in a heap of glitter and plastic dejectedly. 

“You’re insufferable,” Nick tells him. “You’re the fucking grinch.”

Seiji drops a bauble on Nicholas’s head in retaliation. This escalates into a short, but gruesome bauble war, which ends abruptly when Nick hurls a particularly sparkly one and hit smacks Seiji square in the face. He retreats back to his side of the room angrily, and Nicholas dismisses this as the last interaction between them for tonight.

He’s completely wrong, of course. Firstly Seiji yells at him - well, he doesn’t yell, because Seiji won’t _ really  _ yell unless they’re fighting - because Nick puts on  _ Jingle Bell Rock.  _ and again when Nick tries to put up a string of lights.

He doesn’t hiss or snap at Nick when he mentions that he’s left one decoration untouched, though. He just looks puzzled, and a little annoyed.

“What’s a mistletoe,” Seiji demands when Nick voices his observation slyly. 

Nicholas sighs. “Of course you don’t know what it is.” He shakes his head in mock disappointment. 

Seiji sniffs. “My father has more important matters to attend to than inconvenient festivities.”

He sounds almost defensive, and Nick guesses he was wrong about the ham and v-neck sweater. 

“Well,” Nicholas says, taking the mistletoe off the door where he’d stuck it a few days earlier and shaking it, grinning. “It’s never too late to start celebrating.”

Seiji is sitting on his bed, but Nicholas can still see him turn a little pink with anger or embarrassment, he isn’t sure. “This isn’t the stupid kissing weed, is it?” Seiji says icily. “You cannot possibly be suggesting-”

Nicholas shrugs and waggles his eyebrows like it doesn’t really matter, except it does, kind of. “It’s the Christmas spirit, dude,” he says, ignoring his rising heartbeat purfusely because there is no way he has a dumb twelve-year-old crush on his stuck-up roommate. That would be incredibly embarrassing. Which is why he doesn’t.

Seiji crosses his arms over his chest and glowers like a petulant child. “Absolutely not,” he says tightly, and Nicholas can’t say he wasn’t expecting it, so that is the end of that.

Except it isn’t. 

Nicholas flops on his bed, mistletoe in hand, and begins flicking through his playlists on his phone, when he hears a shift on the other side of the duck curtain.

And then footsteps.

And now Seiji is looming over him like an angry giraffe, arms crossed, ears red. Nicholas blinks at him. He doesn’t quite know what’s going on until Seiji holds out his hand, pointing to the mistletoe in Nicholas’s.

“Give me that,” he says, a little unevenly, and okay, this is a thing that’s happening, so Nick slaps the plant into Seiji’s palm and smiles widely, stands, flutters his eyelashes at him.

He isn’t actually expecting Seiji to roll his eyes, hold the mistletoe above their heads and kiss Nick, actually kiss him, but that’s what Seiji does. He presses his lips to Nicholas’s softly and sweetly that his skin burns and his eyes flutter closed and wow, okay,  _ wow, okay,  _ and now Seiji’s tipping his head to the side, a shaky hand in Nicholas’s hair, and when Nick tugs him closer by the sleeves of his hoodie, depending the kiss just a little, and now Seiji is pulling away and he’s scowling uncertainly, which is unfairly cute and he opens his mouth and closes it again; brushes Nick’s arm, turns away and disappears behind the duck curtain. 

  
  
  
  


On Christmas morning, Nicholas wakes up to the sound of the shower running, rain pounding on the roof. He opens his eyes, blinks, lies still for a minute and then winces as he remembers yesterday and  _ what in the fuck  _ is he supposed to do about that? Pretend it never happened? He doesn’t really see any other options. 

It’s either that or confess his embarrassing crush on Seiji and suffer an inevitable rejection. Or whatever it is. Nicholas wouldn’t call it a  _ crush.  _ He isn’t that lame. 

_ Yes, you are,  _ his brain supplies. Nick sighs and reaches for his phone, but grasps paper instead. He holds it up to his face because what the  _ fuck,  _ and yeah, it’s paper- it’s a card. It’s just plain white, folded, and there’s something weird and kind of squishy shoved inside, a plant maybe; the front reads ‘ _ Nicholas’  _ in Seiji’s neat printing. 

Nicholas squints at it. He hasn’t received many cards in his life. Never a Christmas card, which he supposes this must be (or maybe a death threat, telling Nicholas never to speak of the kiss again or Seiji will break his epee). So he opens it, and it says, written large on the inside:  _ boyfriend? _

Beside the question, the mistletoe is taped neatly to the card. 

Nick stares at it in disbelief. 

No fucking way.

Is this a thing that’s happening? Yes. Okay. This is actually a thing that’s happening. Nicholas might pass out. He’s pretty sure he does, but then he hears the door to the bathroom open and he jumps out of bed like he’s attached to springs.

Seiji’s closing the door, shaking out his wet hair when Nicholas yells “BOYFRIEND!” at him. He startles, colours rapidly like a thermostat’s heat rising, and says, “Shut up.”

Nicholas launches himself at Seiji then, wraps his arms around him tightly. “Yes,” he says, and holds up the mistletoe with a grin.

  
  
  


_ As far as school christmases go, it’s a pretty good one. _

  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
